The Bath to Enlightenment

Are you the kind of rough-and-tumble guy who works hard, plays harder, and doesn't give a damn about silly things like hygiene, a savings account, or a healthy liver? Dude, it might be time to take a bubble bath

I look back on my twenties and shudder. Let me know if any of this sounds familiar: Publicly I seemed well put together. I was successful at work
and thrived socially. But privately
I was a mess. I hated being alone, only cleaned up my apartment if somebody was coming over, worked way too much, slept way too little, never had my shit together financially, rarely went to the doctor. Like a lot of my friends, I was a sort of rambling, overgrown Peter Pan, suspended in perpetual adolescence.
I made little effort to take care of myself.

Here's the part you might not relate
to: What changed me was an $80 jar of body balm.

I was never the fastidiously groomed type. In my roaring twenties, I wore my self-destructive streak like a badge of honor. I thought it was cool that I rarely
so much as looked in the mirror.

Then, three years ago, when I was 28, my girlfriend (now fiancée) caught me standing in a towel at her sink huffing
a bottle of her body balm. I was surprised to hear her say, "Try some!" Wait, really? It was expensive, and she'd been carefully rationing it out. At her insistence,
I slathered on about $5 worth. It made me feel like a grizzly drifter who'd broken into a luxury spa. But I laughed when she offered to buy me a bottle. "You gotta be kidding!" I said. "I can't use stuff like this." She stopped me. "Why is it okay for me but not for you?"

Look, I know how this sounds, but seriously? Growing out of the whole adolescent self-destructive shtick started with me (literally) cleaning myself up.
I was like a delinquent kid who lands in the military and finds himself taking perverse pleasure in folding his uniform and cornering his bed. For the first time,
I took a good look at my skin. I went to
a dermatologist. I started using pore strips for the blackheads on my oily nose. (Yes, really.) For ten minutes in the morning and ten minutes at night, I took care of myself—and I didn't stop at grooming.
I'm probably still rough around the edges, but now I go to the gym, I go to the doctor, I set up my 401(k).

I'm not saying anyone else is going to experience a rite of passage at the bottom of a bottle of glorified skin moisturizer. But in a time when men are encouraged to live like eternal frat boys, we've got to find an entry point to the grown-up world. You can't keep living like Seth Rogen in Knocked Up or some bootleg Keith Richards wannabe. Bad credit is
not cool. Unwashed bedsheets are nasty. And never going to the doctor? C'mon, son. Find one aspect of your life where you can learn to take care of yourself and the rest will fall like dominoes. For me, bizarrely, it happened when I admitted that I'm a grown-ass man with dry skin and an oily nose—and that it was time to do something about it.